In this hard economic era, companies are trying all possible ways to minimize their overall operational expenditure. One of them is by outsourcing secretarial services. When it comes to areas such as secretarial and administrative tasks, these services are providing great solutions for many companies. Here is a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on both in-house and outsourced company secretarial services, you should know.

Advantages of Outsourced Company Secretarial Services

Outsourced company secretarial services do present a wide variety of value-added benefits, both startups, and established firms.

Cost Efficiency

The biggest benefits of using outsourced secretarial services are the amount of company operational expenditure you can be able to cut down on. To begin with, you won’t have to invest in a comprehensive training program or refresher course for secretaries. You will not have to invest in the normally expensive office equipment that is necessary to retain in-house secretaries. You will also not be obliged to foot regular employee pay and work benefits for secretaries. All of these factors will be the sole responsibility of the company whose services you outsource.

Versatility of Services

Now more than ever, you will be able to outsource any particular secretarial service your company requires at any moment. Most of the most reputable companies who provide these services make it their primary business to retain a team of secretaries who are experts in specific fields of this profession. Some of the most notable are statutory financial returns, tax records maintenance, business paperwork filing, company resolutions preparation to mention but a few. These are extremely specialized skills that can require substantial investment if you decided to employ in-house secretaries.

Enhanced Company Efficiency

It is a well known that outsourcing secretarial services do in fact improve office efficiency. In turn, this improves productivity. These professionals are always dedicated to the projects that are handed to them and will always ensure they perform a professional and exemplary job.

Disadvantages of Outsourced Company Secretarial Services

Finally, outsourcing company secretarial services can prove to be a hindrance to the more established businesses. Like it had been earlier noted, the level of trustworthiness and accountability isn’t always at par. Additionally, you will not have direct control over the duties you delegate to your chosen outsourcing company.

Confidentiality and Trustworthiness

To begin with, the sensitive nature of this job, corporate entities deeply appreciate having secretaries whom they can absolutely trust. Secretaries often have to process very sensitive documents like tax returns, file confidential documents and review secret company resolutions. This means having an in-house set of secretaries they have vetted is an essential consideration.

Accountability and Accessibility

For the more the established business entities, having someone whom they can access on a daily basis is critical. Also, having someone who can always be accountable for his or her actions is also important. This provides the firm assurance that they will always be in a position of having some high level of direct control over the tasks they allocate to them. This cannot be so with outsourced services.

Significant Costs Involved in Retaining In-House Secretaries

First of all, to hire regular in-house secretaries, you will have to make a colossal investment in accessing such services. This includes comprehensively training your secretaries to be able to efficiently undertake the various administrative tasks you set for all. Additionally, you will have invest in the necessary equipment and office space for them to be fully operational. Thirdly, you will have to meet regular human resources expenditure such as salaries, PAYE tax, pensions, sickness pay, and vacation pay. All of these costs can be overwhelming for a startup or even a small business establishment.

In-House Office Politics Influence

With in-house secretaries, there is always a high possibility of petty office politics influencing the quality of work done. Interpersonal employee relationships can make some secretaries prefer working for certain ‘bosses’ than others. Also, the level of confidentiality, as well as discretion, can also have a toll on the way the job is handled.

One of the major reasons behind the failure of most start-ups is the lack of business systems. As most startups do not have the adequate financial backing to deploy multiple people, it is mostly the owner of the business who looks after multiple activities single-handedly. This causes the owners of businesses to lose out on opportunities to develop strategies for the development of business or sustenance of the same.

If you own a business that does not have a very impressive annual turnover, you would obviously try to do operational things all on your own to cut down on manpower costs. Be it generating the leads, or managing the sales or handling the post sales queries, everything will be done by you. This would eventually lead to two things – choking off your bandwidth which will force you to do the same mundane things repeatedly over and over again, and it will get you gradually frustrated.

To avoid all that, it is thus best to invest on deploying business systems which will provide a solid framework for the business and will take care of the operational aspects of the business without much ado.

What are Business Systems?

In the simplest form, a business system is a process of systemizing the business. This involves defining the process of carrying of tasks or activities that are required to be carried out by an individual in a business. With the process in place, there would not be any requirement of a particular individual to carry out a particular task. For example, if there is a requirement of sending out product newsletters to potential customers on a daily basis, an automated system can do that automatically without any manual intervention.

Thus, by deploying a system in the business, the owner need not worry about the implementation of that particular task it will be carried out without his intervention. The most critical system for any business is the sales system, the delivery system, and the customer service systems.

Benefits of Deploying Business Systems

While talking about the benefits of business systems for an organization, the first thing that is worth mentioning is that it drives consistency in the business processes and removes the dependency from people. The major benefits are as follows.

As they carry out tasks basis a certain pre-decided process, a systematized business ensures that the task is carried out consistently, regardless of who is carrying it out. Sticking to the example of sending emails to the customers, a systematized business will define the process of writing that email. What should be written on the title, what should be written on the body of the email and everything would be standardized, leaving a little scope of inconsistency.

As already mentioned above, it enables the business to not depend on any particular individual. This fosters an environment of equality which is better for the overall health of the business.

This is particularly useful for new employees as with systems in place they will not have to reinvent the wheel. As systems would be in place, all they would have to do is get them trained with the systems and they would be ready to perform.

It makes the business run seamlessly, thereby attracting potential customers. More customers to the business would mean better sales and profit figures.

As the business owners are relieved of their daily chores of business, they can dedicate their time in thinking about new ways and defining new strategies to make the business more powerful and expand further.

As it leaves little or no scope of confusion anywhere, deployment of systems also fosters healthy work environment. This leads to satisfied employees with better productivity as well as more dedication while catering to customers and that in turn, will help the business grow.

Owing to all the benefits as mentioned above, it is obvious that not having a system would mean a lot of issues to the organization. It would not only impact the various business operations, but it would also delay the growth of the business and will slowly get the business on the verge of getting closed. Thus to avoid the debacle, it is wise that business owners invest on business systems and get them in place to help the organization succeed in overcoming the challenges of the business.